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“... discretion in the matter may have lapsed through lack of use in the 20th century. In 1924 the King was unhappy about granting MacDonald’s request, which produced the third general election in three years (perhaps this is a more awful prospect today than it was in the 1920s), but he did not resist, for fear of showing bias against the party of the ...”

“... a brief, profound and very welcome social revolution’. The French professor Marie Alexandrine Martin writes in her full-scale history of modern Cambodia that, on the contrary, the peace mission favoured ‘Phnom Penh’s profiteers, the Khmer Rouge utopists, the Chinese businessmen of South-East Asia, the annexationist neighbours’. She believes that ...”

“... its role in banking supervision and managing government debt, but under the governorship of Mervyn King, who took over in 2003 (and who commissioned Kynaston to write this book), became a powerful machine with one overriding purpose: to hit the inflation target. There would be criticism, later, that the bank’s narrow focus prevented it from paying attention ...”

“... and put on clothes. Anything else will be laced with shame – the kind of shame that ate away at Martin Luther King in his private moments, the shame that haunts many black people struggling for equality through non-violence and reconciliation. There’s no question about it, the ‘good blacks’, the loving blacks, all ...”

“... George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, and concerns twin girls who saw their own father lynched. ‘I wanted to write a book that was not just about Black pain,’ Bennett continued, ‘but also about Black ...”

“... sentimentality which, at the Queen’s behest and with her all-too-active co-operation, Theodore Martin lavished on the Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of ...”

“... best thing to do is to plunge into the middle or just beyond and then work back and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of ...”

“... stories: ‘Instead of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus, tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King.’ Even Alexander Portnoy is a trusted aide to New York City’s liberal mayor John Lindsay, a tribune of the Great Society. In the thick of his erotic adventures, he can’t help remembering how he spent ...”

“... doubt. The book ends with the evasive reflection that you cannot blame the conflict on king or kaiser. Instead, a conveniently abstracted and personified Death takes the rap. The novel is unable or unwilling to transcend its protagonist’s restricted outlook on the question of why all this is happening. Willie’s view is not restricted because he ...”

“... that state education could not be ‘equal’ if it was also ‘separate’, through a decade of Martin Luther King’s non-violent marches, boycotts and sit-ins against Southern segregation, American Presidents were forced at last to pay serious attention to the African American. If Eisenhower was reluctant and Kennedy ...”

“... Reviewing a new edition of Ulysses in 1986, Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... horned helmets as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the ...”

“... the light of day, they proved an invaluable resource. But, if we try to recount the history of ‘King’, as Martin Luther King Jr High in the mid-1990s was called, it is a story not so much of surprising conjunctions and discoveries, of which the quiet alliance between an efficient ...”

“... fortuitously, with his invasions of Portugal and Spain in 1807-8. His brusque dethronement of King Ferdinand VII caused consternation in Spain’s transatlantic colonies, prompting creole leaders to snatch power from colonial viceroys and governors and (in 1810) to set up embryonic national governments, outwardly (and mostly sincerely) professing loyalty ...”